Tewksbury began to return to some sense of normalcy on Tuesday, as crews continued their efforts to restore power to more than 10,400 homes and businesses that lost service during the snowstorm over the weekend.

As of 7 a.m., power had been restored to roughly 80 percent of National Grid customers in Tewksbury. But there are still around 2,000 homes in the dark.

Schools re-opened Tuesday and most businesses, some of which had been closed since Saturday evening, opened their doors to customers.

According to National Grid President Marcy Reed, crews have been brought in from Virginia, Texas Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan and North Carolina to assist local crews in restoring power. The company currently has more than 1,800 workers restoring power across the state.

According to state officials, there are still more than 300,000 people in Massachusetts without power as of Tuesday morning.

To this point, National Grid will only say they believe most customers will have power restored by 11:45 p.m. Thursday. Check out our live power outage map for any changes in the restoration schedule.

“We realize the major inconvenience it is for people to be without power and want our customers to know we are doing everything we can to restore power as quickly as possible,” said Marcy Reed, president, National Grid Massachusetts.  “However, even with all the resources that we are deploying to restore power, it takes time to repair damage as extensive as what we incurred this weekend.”

Reed pointed out that the major difference between this storm and the aftermath of Hurricane Irene -- in which hundreds of thousands lost power in New England -- is that after Irene, the bulk of outages were caused by transmission damage. That was easier to fix and made it possible to restore power to large numbers of customers at once. In this outage, the process has involved a variety of solutions. And although the company has been able to restore power to so many so far, the process from now on will be longer.

Additional storm recovery news:

• _The Emergency Shelter remains open at the Tewksbury Senior Center_ for any residents whose electricity and heat are still out. The shelter can house up to 50 people. However, it is also a good location for any resident to stop by and get warned up, get a meal and something hot to drink. You can also get storm and emergency services information or you can call the _Tewksbury Police Department at 978-851-7373._ A handful or residents slept at the shelter last night but more are expected tonight, as temperatures are expected to fall to freezing and below.
• Trick-or-treating has been postponed to Nov. 6, from 6 to 8 p.m.
• The Community Safe Halloween event has been rescheduled for Sunday, Nov. 6, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Parks and Recreation complex.